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May 10, 2010

Select Similar Objects

Before AutoCAD LT 2011, if you wanted to select, say, all the red circles in your drawing or all the lines on the WALL layer, you’d use the Quick Select command. It’s a really powerful and flexible feature that can save a lot of time when selecting objects for editing.

But now, there’s an even easier way to select objects with similar properties.

Select Similar is available from the right-click shortcut menu when you have one or more objects selected. It automatically grabs all the objects in the drawing that are similar to the one(s) you had selected.

But wait—how does it decide what objects are “similar”? To set your selection criteria, enter SELECTSIMILAR at the command line, and then SE for Settings.

By default, “Layer” and “Name” are checked. “Layer” is obvious, but “Name” only applies to named objects like blocks, images, and xrefs. Object type (circle, line, block, etc.) is always a selection criterion.

With the default settings, two lines on the same layer but with different colors would both be selected by Select Similar. Same for two circles on the same layer but with different linetypes.

You can check or uncheck as many boxes as you like to define your selection set narrowly or broadly.

If you select more than one object to use with Select Similar, the selection criteria are applied to each object individually. So if you select a circle and a line on the same layer, Select Similar will find all the circles and all the lines on that layer. If you select two lines on different layers, Select Similar will find all the lines on both layers. If you select a circle on one layer and a line on another, Select Similar will find all the circles on the same layer as the circle and all the lines on the same layer as the line.